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derealization

This afternoon, my therapist and I had planned to do some EMDR related to X, but we started talking about my birthday (which was last Tuesday, which means I survived another trip ’round the sun, which is excellent!) and the somewhat messed-up present my biological mother sent me.

I won’t go into details on the gift because details are irrelevant. The important part is, we started talking about The Night My Mother Tried to Kill My Grandmother™.

I’ve written (and spoken) about it pretty extensively before–or at least made reference to it–but the gist of it is, there was a huge argument that culminated in my (very drunk) mother assaulting my grandmother.

(There is a brief, yet potentially disturbing description of assault below, in white; please mouse over only if you are comfortable with and prepared to read it.)

My mother knocked my grandmother’s walker away.

Side note: My grandmother had broken her hip a few years before and was still having trouble getting around. Plus, she was around 73 years old by this point. My mother stood on my grandmother’s feet and punched her repeatedly in the face.

All of this was relayed to me, years later, by one of my aunts.

When it happened, I was seven years old.

At this point, you may be wondering why in god’s name I would want to go dredging that up. After all, memories are repressed for a reason, right?

Basically, we mapped out the first few years of my life and discovered that my grandmother was my strongest attachment figure, which is kind of a no-brainer. The woman was the one constant in my life. When I was four and she broke her hip shoveling snow and had to spend months in a rehabilitation facility, I was gutted. Sure, my great-aunt was around, and I loved her dearly, but she wasn’t my Grandma. She wasn’t my mom.

Side-side note: Anyone can be a mother, but not anyone can be a mom. Also, anyone can be your mom–it doesn’t matter whether they gave birth to you.

We’re finding that a lot of my anxiety–most notably my fear that something bad will happen to my fella or someone else I care about–stems from my overwhelming terror that on that night, my grandmother was going to die.

She didn’t, thankfully. But from that point on, I was a different child. True, unfettered happiness no long existed. It was tempered by a constant watchfulness, the fear that she would be taken from me again.

I couldn’t sleep in my own bedroom for a year or so after that night. My grandmother, in her infinite wisdom, noted that there were two twin beds in her bedroom–she’d previously had them pushed together and was using the space in between as a quick place to stash her books, a flashlight, tissues, and so on. However, she cleared all of that out and I started sleeping down there, which helped.

A little.

There were many nights when I would wake from a dead sleep in a panic and watch her closely to make sure she was still breathing. More than once, I ran upstairs and woke my sleeping aunt in tears, afraid that my grandmother had died.

My therapist and I also think that this whole attachment thing is the reason I experience love (and most other positive emotions) cerebrally rather than in a true emotional sense. I can’t process those feelings anymore. It’s not that I don’t want to, or that I don’t try. I just can’t access that part of myself and it’s been decades since I last could. I am, in essence, a little bit dead inside.

Our hope is that by filling this gap, by finding the missing pieces that are hidden under the fridge, behind the bookshelf, between the cushions of the couch, I will be able to begin healing and connect my head with my heart. That has always been one of my primary treatment goals. I want to be fully present. I want to feel things instead of having a general awareness that I’m having feelings (and sometimes having brief flickers of actual feelings).

I want that block gone, and I’ll pay just about any price. I’ve lived too long with my head down, shouldering through every obstacle, focused only on getting to the next checkpoint. I’m tired of surviving. I want to live. If my quality of life has to momentarily suffer for that to happen, I can live with that.

I have some exciting news to share with you guys today. On Sunday night, I had the opportunity to hang with the crew of Strange Flavors and tell a little bit of my story about what it’s like to live with depersonalization/derealization; we also talked a little bit about living with bipolar disorder.

This has actually been in the works for a few weeks. As some of you know, I took a ton of classes during intersession, which is basically a one-month set of classes going at breakneck speed. It was madness, but I knocked out nine credits in a month, so I consider it a victory overall.

One of the courses I needed to take for my program was career/life development (something, something…the actual course title was pretty long and I’ve forgotten the rest of it). During that week, I connected with the fabulous Neha, whose brother and a few friends run the Strange Flavors podcast. She approached me on the last day of class, said I seemed interesting (which I found ridiculously flattering), and told me to shoot her a text about possibly making an appearance.

So, fast forward to Sunday. I showed up to do the podcast and was immediately welcomed by Amber and Faras, two of the podcast wizards. They made me feel incredibly comfortable and welcomed, and it was an amazing experience! We sat for about an hour while we did the standard podcast-interview thing; I found their questions incredibly helpful, because my thought train tends to majorly derail when I actually talk about this stuff.

I brought my fella with me for moral support. (He was also curious about how a podcast is made, and we planned to hit up Alewife on the way home. Spoiler alert: They were closed. At 7:30 PM. On a Sunday. Boo!)

I’d never been on an actual podcast before. I’d done the Risk! live show in 2015 and have, of course, made some really crappy-quality videos for my Youtube channel, but this was a totally different animal. They also recorded video of the session, which made me freak out a little bit because I cannot stress enough how unphotogenic I am. However, I’m looking at in a positive light and am excited to see the video once they throw it up on their channel.

Here’s the podcast–have a listen and let me know what you think!

So what’s next? I have a new video a-comin’ that I’m planning to upload probably next week, and I’m thinking of submitting another pitch to Risk!. Gotta keep that hype train rollin’, right?

Anyway, check out the rest of the Strange Flavors podcasts–they’re funny and genuine and I think you’ll really like them.

Another spoiler: The big thing on Strange Flavors is that at the end of each episode, they ask their guest to say what flavor they’d be and why. I chose violet-flavored hard candy, but you’ll have to listen to the episode to find out my reasoning behind it. Ha!

Until next time, readers, stay safe and sane. I’ll catch you guys in the very near future.

Jeanette at My Life with PTSD & Bipolar: Mental Health Matters kindly nominated me for
Write a brief story about how your blog began. I’ve been running The Dissociated Press for five years now (holy cats, time flies!) and have been documenting my journey to mental health–or at least, relative stability and improved daily functioning. When I started this blog in 2013, my life was a total mess. I was in an unhappy marriage and missing a lot of work because I was freshly diagnosed with bipolar 1 and adjusting to my new medications. I ended up losing that job, which was a major low point.

There have been a lot of low points throughout my blog-writing history, but things have dramatically improved in the last couple of years. I escaped from that unhappy, unsupportive marriage, enrolled in graduate school for clinical mental health counseling at a great school, and got engaged to a lovely, wonderful man.

I still hit depressive episodes from time to time, but unlike my pre-medication, bad relationship days, I take comfort in the knowledge that my life is so much better than I ever could have imagined. I have a wonderfully supportive partner, and his family is incredibly encouraging of me sharing my journey. My classmates have expressed appreciation for my candor, and I’ve been able to help a lot of people through my disclosures.

Advice for new bloggers is something I haven’t really thought about, but my main piece of advice is to write for yourself first and foremost. TDP has evolved over time–at first, it was a place for me to get my thoughts and experiences out into the ether in hopes of finding others who were also struggling.

Also, I like to focus on and directly address my readers as a group in my posts and always try to end a post with a positive thought or insight. It prevents the blog from feeling dreary and helps promote the overall message: recovery is possible, and recovery never looks the same for everyone. Your journey matters. Your message matters. Your experiences matter.

As I’ve gotten healthier and stopped focusing so much on my illnesses (which are still a main focal point of the blog, albeit in a different way), I realized that my relatively small following was a great audience for information about the stigma surrounding mental illness.

I realized that everyone, but especially others living with my specific conditions (PTSD with depersonalization/derealization and rapid-cycling type 1 bipolar disorder) could benefit from learning about the latest news and treatment options. I’m building up quite the library of scholarly articles and studies, and if there’s enough interest, I plan to post a few quick-and-dirty rundowns of them.

Again, I can’t thank Jeanette for this nomination–it came out of nowhere and I feel very honored about the whole thing and appreciate being recognized for my work. Validation and recognition for what I’m doing always feels nice! Also, the badge image is really cute.

School started last week and there’s been a lot going on in my life on the personal side–my 94-year-old grandma, who essentially raised me as her own for most of my childhood, has been ill and I’ve once again been dealing with anticipatory grief.

Anyway, on a happier note, here’s some news for you about PTSD. (And it’s literally happy–it’s about Ecstasy!)

Important distinction: MDMA isn’t FDA-approved, but this is a huge step in a very promising direction.

Right now, PTSD treatment options are super-limited. My brand is pretty wicked, but my only option for dealing with the symptoms is lorazepam/Ativan. I count myself lucky that I only have depersonalization/derealization, anxiety around crowds, and the occasional nightmare. It could be a lot worse. I’ve written extensively in the past about my experiences with dissociation (hence the name of the blog), but like most things, you get used to it.

But it’s not something anyone should have to “get used to.” None of us should have to accept the symptoms as our “new normal,” and for many, the symptoms are debilitating. That pretty much goes without saying (though of course, I decided to say it anyway).

I recently completed a research proposal for one of my summer classes, and while it was a painful process for someone who’s not a big research fan, it was definitely eye-opening. There has been shockingly little research done on depersonalization/derealization; most of what I encountered deals with “dissociation” in broader terms and the individual disorders are either not specified or are all lumped together in a mass that ultimately provides no insight about the actual conditions.

Anyway, that’s a post for another day. What I’m getting at is that PTSD is an incredibly complicated beast. While some symptoms are consistent, it never looks the same in two different people. Anecdotally, the symptoms can look different at various stages in a person’s life.

Seven years ago, I was having flashbacks (not the dramatic Hollywood kind where you’re literally in the memory–the kind where you sort of space out and the memory plays out in your mind’s eye while you’re pretty much unresponsive to the real world). Then, in 2012, the flashbacks stopped and the depersonalization/derealization got its hooks into me and has been hanging on for dear life ever since.

Like I said, you get used to it. The pain fades. You adjust to never really feeling “real,” to being in this perpetual dreamlike state. When it spikes, I try to welcome it as a new adventure and pay attention to what feels different without getting anxious or judging it as “bad.”

Still, it would be nice if there was something out there that could help just a little. I’ll be keeping my eye on the MDMA breakthrough and keep you posted on further developments.

In the meantime, readers, what helps with your symptoms? Grounding exercises are one of my favorite things to do if I start to feel anxious. It’s less tedious than counting things.

I say this because of the things I know beyond a doubt: I am attractive, there is nothing wrong with my body. But I need reassurance about the physical things because of the most important parts I can’t accept—the thought that I am worthy and lovable and worthwhile and that I don’t ruin everything I touch.

*

I had a particularly disturbing dream last night that D. suddenly decided he didn’t love me, never had. I told him I was feeling suicidal and his response was something along the lines of, “Actually, that’s the best thing that could happen to me right now.” I woke up in a panic, convinced that it had been real. I had some terrible dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream experience last night, and it’s left me a little rattled. I know the dream is just my subconscious vomiting out the particularly horrible bits of all the abuse I’ve taken—the dream situation is ripped almost verbatim from something that happened countless times in a past relationship—but it’s still upsetting.

It’s upsetting because after all these years and how far I’ve come, I still feel like a victim. It’s upsetting because my childhood would have fucked me up enough without the awful part in my teens where I realized that even if someone tells you they love you, they can still hurt you terribly. In some cases, they can hurt you more after they’ve said it.

*

A stranger once complimented me on my eyes and followed it with, “But there’s something unquiet about them.” It took me a long time to realize that everything I’ve gone through has turned me into a haunted house. If the eyes are windows to the soul, then the restlessness in mine is because of all the horrible memories, all the ghosts.

*

D. and I were discussing “Inception” the other day. “I wonder what my subconscious would look like,” I said. He replied, “I’m pretty sure it would be full of monsters.”

*

I’ve been reading a lot about self-harm and how it relates to prior abuse (the book I’m currently reading focuses on the theory that childhood abuse is completely to blame, but for me, it’s been more of a cumulative effect). I have to go slow because it’s very triggering for me, but it’s also hauling some useful anecdotes up from the depths and forcing me to confront a lot of hard truths about myself—about what happened to me during the first twenty years of my life and how those experiences have shaped almost everything about me.

*

I’m heading back to therapy on Thursday, and I’m feeling particularly anxious about it. I’m not sure what to expect; I already know my prognosis for ever coming out of the dissociative state is pretty grim, and that it’s likely I’ll be in therapy for the rest of my life. We have to move so maddeningly slow—working through the trauma without awakening my defense mechanisms is like trying to sneak past a sleeping dragon in a cave. If it shifts in its sleep or makes a sound, we have to go back and find a safe hiding place until it passes.

My therapist is wonderful. She’ll start off by prompting me to share what’s been going on in my life, and then she’s somehow able to zero in on what I need to talk about during that session. She reassures me that it’s okay if I can only handle remembering things for a minute or two—she says it’s a lot healthier than going at it too hard and making the dissociation even worse.

I’ve gotten pretty good about just accepting the way things are, the numbness and the detachment. But there are times when it makes me want to scream, when I just want to feelsomething other than all the pain and numbness. I want to be in the moment all the time instead of faking it. I want hearing “I love you” during sex to feel good instead of scaring the shit out of me and causing me to shut down.

I want someone to turn me off and fix me. I wish I had a factory default switch, that I could go back to being an infant and be born into a situation that wouldn’t cause so much damage. People say I’m lucky; the abuse has given me an endless source of inspiration for writing, and most people with “normal”/stable home lives have to work harder.

To that, I say: Fuck you so very, very much. If any one of those people had to live like this even for a day, they’d probably end up putting a gun to their head before sundown. No one wants to live like this. No one.

*

I know this post has jumped all over the damn place; please bear with me, as I’ve been dealing with some pretty brutal cycling as of late. I want to close this on a positive note, so let’s just appreciate that I made it through two suicide attempts, nine months of self-harm, and a lot of substance abuse—and that’s just this year.

I want to live the rest of my life without ending up in a hospital. I want to make it through this without dying by my own hand. I want to be happy, if I can’t be completely well ever again.

I’ll be posting book recommendations/what I’m currently reading (research for the memoir), brain droppings that aren’t quite long or substantial enough to warrant their own blog post, and whatever else pops into my head (so in other words, anything goes). I’d love it if you guys would “like” the page and jump into the fray by asking questions or whatever it is people do on Facebook nowadays.

At this point, I can’t say that I’m cured or that my bipolar is in remission, but something feels different. My mood swings aren’t as intense as they were before, and “Flat/numb” has replaced “Depressed” as my default mood state. I still can’t remember the last time I felt truly happy without also feeling some underlying negative emotion, but I actually feel hopeful.

My PTSD is still pretty bad. There’s some parking lot construction going on right outside our apartment, and when I had to walk past it yesterday to get home, I flinched, jumped about a foot, and had to clamp my hands down over my ears to get through the unrelenting roar of construction equipment. I felt embarrassed and remember thinking, “Normal people don’t act like this.” But I’m trying not to judge my reactions and emotions. My therapists over the years have all encouraged me to just experience them without having a knee-jerk response and assigning a morality to everything.

My derealization/depersonalization is present, as always, and I’ve been having unnerving spikes in severity that have unusual triggers…if I have my head turned or tilted a certain way and I say something/something is said to me, for example, the detached feeling increases tenfold and sticks around until I finally go to sleep. It seems to only happen in the late afternoon/early evening, but I’m still not sure what to make of it. But in spite of this, I feel like I’m finally starting to recover. I’ll deal with the emotional bit first; then, I’ll try to tackle my dissociation.

My current episode of depersonalization/derealization has been going on for well over a year, as I’ve mentioned before, but it’s particularly bad today. I slept way too late, until 2:00 this afternoon, and woke up feeling very disoriented and detached. I sat on the couch for close to an hour, staring out the window…it felt like five minutes. I wasn’t even thinking about anything; my mind was essentially blank.

I wish I knew of a better way to describe what the detachment feels like. I usually tell people that it’s like being in a dreamlike state, and sometimes say it’s like being incredibly stoned (if the person in question has dabbled). D. sat on the floor next to me this evening while I had a smoke, and as I described how I was feeling, I was making a fist with my free hand.

I didn’t even notice the bloody furrows my nails had left behind until I went to wash my hands about ten minutes later. I didn’t feel my hand clenching up. I didn’t feel any pain.

Today, my mind is about a thousand miles away from my body. It’s usually not this bad; I’m not sure what’s triggering it, though I suspect it’s the oversleeping. But at the same time, I can’t really help that—I’m going through a nasty depressive cycle (which, given the fact that my bipolar is rapid-cycling, should be over soon—that’s the silver lining to all of this) and tend to be especially somnolent during these phases.

I have therapy tomorrow at five. I tutor on Tuesday night, have another doctor appointment on Wednesday, and work Thursday through Saturday. I’m hoping I’ll make some decent money this weekend, now that I know how to handle my shit at work. I feel bad for not being able to work a regular full-time nine-to-five, but the combination of mental illnesses I have can be pretty debilitating. It’s hard to keep a forty-hour work week when you regularly bottom out at two P.M. and feel like if you don’t go home and bury yourself in a mountain of blankets, you’ll finally snap and do yourself in.

16. Repeatedly taking on the rescuer role, even when inappropriate to do so

17. Self-harm, self-mutilation, self-injury, self-destruction

18. Suicidal actions and behaviors, failed attempts to suicide

19. Taking the perpetrator role / angry aggressor in relationships

20. Unexplained but intense fears of people, places, things

* My most frequent dissociative symptoms are derealization and depersonalization.

“Depersonalization is characterized by a feeling of detachment or estrangement from one’s self. During an episode of depersonalization, the sense of ‘self’ is disturbed. There is an overall feeling of estrangement and detachment from the self. …Depersonalization can be very distressing because it seems like one is losing their grip on reality, losing control, or ‘going insane.'”

“Derealization – During the experience of derealization, the perception of reality feels distorted and there is a sense of being detached from the outside world. It can feel like living in a dream.”

In the next post on PTSD, I’ll get into some of the messier stuff–mainly, how I ended up with PTSD and how it affects my life. It’s something that is going to require a lot of effort on my part because (as anyone who knows me well can tell you) I don’t really like to talk about it. Joke about it? God, yes, I’ll do that all day long. I’m also able to write about it, to some extent–just the facts, ma’am. But really getting into the heart of it is something I still find incredibly difficult and try to avoid as much as possible.